Culture and Certainty: Legal History and the Reconstructive Project

Abstract

PEOPLE like their conclusions to sound inevitable. A defining characteristic of the Western tradition is that argumentation follows from first principles through deductive logic to objective truth. A traditional argument begins with a highly abstract principle-for example, that human life is sacred. Then, as one's opponents are lulled into agreement, the argument takes unexpected turns: fetuses are babies, babies are human, and abortion is murder.... The traditional argument proceeds through logic to certainty. A defining strategy of modernism3 is to challenge this argumenta-